UC Berkeley Library

Throughout her long life, Portuguese visual artist/poet/scholar/filmmaker Ana Hatherly (1929-2015) reflected creatively and profoundly across diverse media. While her drawings and paintings have been deposited in museums such as the Gulbenkian Museum and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, UC Berkeley is where she earned her PhD and where her published works have been archived. This precious collection, now mostly housed at The Bancroft Library is not large and does not include her personal papers nor very much manuscript  material, but it is the most complete of its kind on this side of the Atlantic. The collection of mostly short-run books published by independent presses serves as a textual archive  to one of the most prolific visual poets of the latter 20th century.

This lightning talk raises questions about the evolving importance of micro-collections and necessity for custodial acquisitions during an unprecedented age of austerity resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Where would our archives and special collections be if we didn’t have the foresight to begin collecting and preserving potentially valuable materials outside of our institution’s collecting parameters when we did? The discussion also affirms the importance of intentional redundancy between circulating and non-circulating collections, and critically interrogates  privileged notions of  “special” and “rare” which have historically kept outsiders like Ana Hatherly out, and others in. 

For more information about Ana Hather's publications at UC Berkeley, please see: See also: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/ana-hatherly

This presentation was given at RBMS 2022. The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) is a section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).